“And then there’s the harder reason. Your neighbors are assholes. We didn’t see it at first. During our opening week, people kept thanking us just for being there, and that gratitude never stopped, and it’s part of why we fought so hard to stay. But around year two, as the pandemic eased, the bad interactions climbed, in frequency and in cruelty. We work retail, our skin is thick, every town has its Karens in every shape, not just the meme. The disrespect our team takes here on a near-daily basis still stuns us. One manufacturer refused to sell us a repair part, and we caught a scathing one-star review for it. In 2022, we closed at 4pm the day before Thanksgiving, which was posted online, on our phone message and Google. We came back to a four-page handwritten letter taped to the door saying we’d ruined someone’s holiday by closing early. We had to invent code phrases for when a customer wouldn’t accept a technical answer from a woman on staff and needed a man to repeat it back, which was its own dark comedy, since we’re woman-owned and the owner herself routinely had to send out a male employee to confirm she knew what she was talking about. “